Thunderstruck

by Erik Larson

  On August 29, 1937, Fleming wrote to Lodge, “It is quite clear that in 1894 you could send and receive alphabetical signals in Morse Code by Electric Waves and did send them 180 feet or so. Marconi’s idea that he was the first to do that is invalid.”

  By this point Fleming was eighty-eight years old but could not resist giving vent to a long-festered bitterness. “Marconi was always determined to claim everything for himself,” he told Lodge, who was now eighty-six. “His conduct to me about the first transatlantic transmission was very ungenerous. I had planned the power plant for him and the first sending was carried out with the arrangement of circuits described in my British patent no 3481 of 1901. But he took care never to mention my name in connection with it.

  “However,” Fleming added, “these things get known in time and justice is done.”

  VOYAGER

  VOYAGER

  IT WAS NOVEMBER 23, 1910. Southampton. A woman identified in the passenger manifest as Miss Allen walked aboard a ship, the Majestic of the White Star Line. She was twenty-seven years old but could easily have been mistaken for a girl in late adolescence.

  For the second time in four months she felt compelled to use a false name. Though this time the circumstances were very different, the motive was the same: escape from gossip and scrutiny. It had been a whirl, London, Brussels, Antwerp, Quebec, and in that time she had felt finer, more loved, and certainly freer than ever before in her life. But now she had to leave.

  On the Majestic she tried to bend her mind away from what had occurred that morning in London. She distracted herself with the glories of the ship and getting herself settled for the voyage. In Camden Town, she knew, a bell had rung fifteen times to mark the moment. She had heard the sound before, at Hilldrop Crescent, when the weather was right, but that was back when she felt safe and the sound of the prison bell was merely the artifact of someone else’s misery, as meaningful as the distant bark of a neighbor’s dog.

  After arriving in New York she traveled to Toronto and adopted the name Ethel Nelson. She took a job as a typist. But Canada proved alien ground. In 1916 she braved seas traversed by German submarines and returned to London, where, as a clerk in a furniture store a few blocks from New Scotland Yard, she met a man named Stanley Smith. They married and raised two children in the peaceful middle-class community of East Croydon. In time she and Stanley became grandparents, but soon afterward he died. He never learned her true past.

  A few years before her own death she received a visitor who had discovered her secret. The visitor was a novelist using the pen name Ursula Bloom, who hoped to write a novel about Dr. Crippen and the North London Cellar Murder. Ethel agreed to meet with her but declined to talk about her past.

  At one point, however, Bloom asked Ethel, if Dr. Crippen came back today, knowing all she knew, would she accept marriage if he asked?

  Ethel’s gaze became intent—the same intensity that Chief Inspector Dew had found striking enough to include in his wanted circular.

  Ethel’s answer came quickly.

  NOTES

  THE MYSTERIOUS PASSENGERS

  Captain Kendall had: For details about Kendall’s background, see Croall, Fourteen Minutes, 22–25.

  The Montrose was launched: For details about the Montrose, see Musk, Canadian Pacific, 59, 74.

  “The Cabin accommodation”: Canadian Pacific Railway Company, Royal Mail Steamship Lines, 1906 Summer Sailing Timetable. Canadian Pacific Steamship Line Memorabilia. In Archives Canada: MG 28 III 23.

  “A little better”: Ibid.

  The manifest: Kendall Statement, August 4, 1910, 1. In NA-MEPO 3/198.

  While on display: Read, Urban Democracy, 412.

  “brilliant but disgusting”: Ibid., 490.

  Shortly before: Kendall Statement, August 4, 1910, 1. In NA-MEPO 3/198.

  “strange and unnatural”: Ibid., 2.

  “I did not do anything”: Ibid., 2.

  PART I: GHOSTS AND GUNFIRE

  DISTRACTION

  “street orderlies”: Macqueen-Pope, Goodbye Piccadilly, 100.

  “diffusion of knowledge”: Bolles Collection. Thomas Allen, The History and Antiquities of London, Westminster, Southwark and Parts Adjacent (Vol. 4). Cowie and Strange, 1827, 363.

  “the great head”: Hill, Letters, 50.

  A young woman: Haynes, Psychical Research, 184.

  Combs Rectory: Jolly, Lodge, 18.

  “Whatever faults”: Lodge, Past Years, 29. Lodge learned later in life that during one phase of his career his children were, as he put it, “somewhat afraid of me.” One incident stood out. He came back late from work, tired and irritable. With his children in bed under strict instructions to keep quiet, he began marking a “thick batch” of examination papers. Suddenly, a stream of water poured onto his windowsill from the children’s room above. He became furious. “I rushed upstairs. They had just got back to bed, and said they had been watering a plant outside on their window-sill. I learned too late that it was one they had been trying to cultivate and were fond of. God forgive me, I flung it out of the window.” The pot smashed on the ground. Later, he heard quiet sobbing coming from the room. He regretted the incident forever afterward (Lodge, Past Years, 252).

  “I have walked”: Ibid., 78.

  “a sort of sacred place”: Ibid., 75.

  “practicians”: For one reference to the term “practician,” see The Electrician, vol. 39, no. 7 (June 11, 1897), 1.

  “inappropriate and repulsive”: Aitken, Syntony, 126.

  “As it is”: Ibid., 112.

  “I became afflicted”: Ibid., 112.

  “to examine”: Haynes, Psychical Research, 6. At times, surely, it must have been difficult to set aside prejudice and prepossession, as when considering the feats of three sisters known widely as “The Three Miss Macdonalds.” They held séances during which the table would tilt for yes and no and tap out the letters of the alphabet, a tedious process in which communicating just the word zoo would have required fifty-eight distinct taps. A times their tables engaged in high-velocity thumping, so much so, according to one historian of the SPR, “that one of them had to jump on it, crinoline and all, and sit there till it slowed down and stopped at last.” One Macdonald sister later had a son named Rudyard, whose Jungle Book became one of the most beloved books of all time (Haynes, Psychical Research, 61).

  “physical forces”: Ibid., xiv.

  Committee on Haunted Houses: Ibid., 25.

  In Boston William James: James’s encounter with Mrs. Piper prompted him to write: “If you wish to upset the law that all crows are black you must not seek to show that no crows are, it is enough if you prove the single crow to be white. My own white crow is Mrs. Piper. In the trances of this medium I cannot resist the conviction that knowledge appears which she has never gained by the ordinary waking use of her eyes and ears and wits.” (Haynes, Psychical Research, 83).

  “This,” he wrote: Ibid., 277.

  “thoroughly convinced”: Ibid., 279.

  In his memoir: Ibid., 184.

  “Well, now you can”: Lodge, Past Years, 113. Lodge’s biographer, W. P. Jolly, wrote of Lodge: “He was of the light cavalry of Physics, scouting ahead and reporting back, rather than the infantry of Engineering, who take and consolidate the ground for permanent useful occupation” (Jolly, Lodge, 113).

  THE GREAT HUSH

  “My chief trouble”: Marconi, My Father, 23. This needs a bit of qualification, for the idea of harnessing electromagnetic waves for telegraphy without wires had been proposed before, in an 1892 article in the Fortnightly Review, written by William Crookes, a physicist and friend of Oliver Lodge. Crookes by this time was one of Britain’s most distinguished scientists, and one of its most controversial because of his interest in the paranormal. In the early 1870s he conducted a detailed investigation of Daniel Douglas Home, a medium who had held séances for Napoleon III, Tsar Alexander II, and other bright lights of the age, and was known for doing such extraordinary things as moving
furniture and grabbing hot coals from fireplaces without injury (and in one case depositing said coals on the bald scalp of a séance participant, supposedly without causing harm). In the famous “Ashley House Levitation” of 1868, Home supposedly floated out one window of the séance room and back in through another. Crookes’s investigations led him to conclude that Home did have psychic powers; he claimed, in fact, to have witnessed Home levitate himself several times. This did not endear him to the men of established British science, and probably accounted for why no one paid much attention to his Fortnightly Review article in which he discussed Heinrich Hertz’s discovery of electromagnetic waves. “Here is unfolded to us a new and astonishing world—one which it is hard to conceive should contain no possibilities of transmitting and receiving intelligence,” he wrote. “Rays of light will not pierce through a wall, nor, as we know only too well, through a London fog. But the electrical vibrations of a yard or more in wave-length of which I have spoken will easily pierce such mediums, which to them will be transparent. Here, then, is revealed the bewildering possibility of telegraphy without wires, posts, cables, or any of our present costly appliances.” The article went virtually unread, and even Lodge appeared not to have paid it any attention (Oppenheim, Other World, 14–15, 35, 344, 475; Jolly, Lodge, 102; d’Albe, Crookes, 341–42).

  “Che orecchi”: Ibid., 8.

  “an aggregate”: Ibid., 8.

  Marconi grew up: For descriptions of Villa Griffone see Marconi, My Father, 6, 22, 24, 191.

  “my electricity”: Ibid., 14.

  “One of the enduring”: Paresce, “Personal Reflections,” 3.

  “The expression on”: Marconi, My Father, 16.

  “He always was”: Maskelyne Incident, 27.

  “the Little Englishman”: Ibid.

  Historians often: Isted, I, 48; Jonnes, Empires, 19.

  As men developed: Collins, Wireless Telegraphy, 36–37. For a good grounding in all things electrical, see Bordeau, Volts to Hertz, and Jonnes, Empires.

  Initially scientists: Collins, Wireless Telegraphy, 36; Jonnes, Empires, 22.

  One researcher: Jonnes, Empires, 29.

  In 1850: Collins, Wireless Telegraphy, 37. The year 1850 also witnessed one of the strangest attempts at wireless communication. A Frenchman allowed two snails to get to know one another, then shipped one snail off to New York, to a fellow countryman, to test the widely held belief that physical contact between snails set up within them an invisible connection that allowed them to communicate with each other regardless of distance. They placed the snails in metal bowls marked with letters of the alphabet, and claimed that when one snail was touched against a letter, the other snail, at the far side of the ocean, likewise touched that letter. Concluding that somehow signals had been transmitted from one snail to the other, the researchers proposed the existence of an etherlike realm that they called “escargotic fluid.” History is silent on the fate of the snails, though the nationality of the two researchers hints at one possible outcome (Baker, History, 21–22).

  In 1880: Ibid., 37.

  He came up with: Ibid., 8.

  He called it: Massie and Underhill, Wireless Telegraphy, 41.

  Lodge’s own statements: Aitken, Syntony, 116, 121; Hong, Wireless, 46.

  “Whilst the issues”: Hancock, Wireless at Sea, 20.

  “Giuseppe was punishing”: Marconi, My Father, 24.

  The coherer “would act”: Hong, Wireless, 19.

  “I did not lose”: Marconi, My Father, 26.

  “he did lose his youth”: Ibid., 2624 Marconi saw no limits: Interview, Francesco Paresce, Munich, April 11, 2005.

  “far too erratic”: Marconi, Nobel, 3.

  THE SCAR

  Details about Crippen’s roots come mainly from Conover, Coldwater, 26–27, 43; Eckert, Buildings, 201–3; Gillespie, A History, 12–18, 47–49, 89–93, 127, 131; Holmes, Illustrated, throughout; History, 118, 159, 172; Massie, Potawatomi Tears, 270; Portrait, 276; Shipway, 8–13; Michigan Business Directory, 1863; Trial, 34–39, 87–130; and miscellaneous photographs, newspaper clippings, letters, and other items held in the Holbrook Heritage Room of the Branch County District Library, Coldwater, Mich.

  The young woman: Trial, 34–35; Cullen, Crippen, 33–34.

  “I believe”: Trial, 88.

  “I told her”: Ibid., 35.

  “the coming of a colony”: History of Branch County, Michigan, 118.

  “The pleasant drives”: Holmes, Illustrated.

  A photograph: This photograph appeared in the Coldwater, Michigan, City Directory of January 1920. Branch County District Library.

  “The devil”: Cullen, Crippen, 30. Cullen, on p. 31, goes so far as to contend that the Book of Isaiah was “Hawley’s favorite.” 32 “the vilest show”: Gillespie, History, 89.

  As a homeopath: Trial, 89.

  At Bethlehem: Ibid., 69, 89.

  “I have never performed”: Ibid., 87–88.

  In January 1892: Cullen, Crippen, 32.

  “it was healed”: Trial, 18–19.

  “There was only one”: Cullen, Crippen, 35.

  “craved motherhood”: Ibid., 35.

  “I love babies”: Ibid., 87.

  Filson Young: Trial, xxv–xxvi.

  “she was always”: Ibid., 88.

  “to the outside world”: Ibid., 126.

  STRANGE DOINGS

  “to do the duty of two”: Lodge, Past Years, 299.

  “Have you ever”: Haynes, Psychical Research, 40. There were so many mediums roaming about the world that an American company sensed opportunity and began marketing a catalog entitled Gambols with the Ghosts, in which it sold various devices for use during séances, such as luminous hands and faces and a “Full, luminous female form” that would materialize slowly and then float around the room (Haynes, Psychical Research, 18).

  “Between deaths”: Lodge, Why I Believe, 26.

  “I am not presuming”: Lodge, Past Years, 297.

  “constantly ejaculating”: Ibid., 295.

  “It was as if”: Ibid., 297.

  “Every time she did this”: Ibid., 301.

  “There must be some”: Ibid., 301.

  “there appeared to emanate”: Ibid., 301.

  “I saw this protuberance”: Ibid., 301.

  “On me touche”: Ibid., 301.

  “As far as the physics”: Ibid., 302.

  ectoplasm: Ibid., 301.

  “The ectoplasmic formation”: Ibid., 302.

  “Let it be noted”: Ibid., 305.

  “Any person”: Ibid., 306.

  “Whether there is any”: Ibid., 60.

  GUNFIRE

  “Every time”: Marconi, My Father, 27.

  “That was when”: Marconi, My Father, 28.

  It was a “practician’s” discovery: Aitken, Syntony, 195, 286.

  “But,” Marconi said: Ibid., 29.

  EASING THE SORE PARTS

  “Does your head”: The Weekly Courier, Coldwater, Mich., April 6, 1895.

  “I will guarantee”: The News and Courier, Charleston, S.C., July 6, 1898.

  “For Piles”: Goodman, Crippen, 13.

  “Heed the Sign”: Cullen, Crippen, 37.

  Later, during the Spanish-American: See photographs at homeoint.org/ photo/m2/munyonjm.htm.

  He called Crippen: Cullen, Crippen, 38.

  “as docile as a kitten”: See “Crippen Family Research Records” at familytrail.com/crippen/DrCrippen2.htm

  “a giddy woman”: Cullen, Crippen, 39.

  “She liked men”: Ibid., 39.

  TWO FOR LONDON

  “No matter how much”: Paresce, “Personal Reflections,” Part II, 1.

  London was still: Details in this paragraph come mainly from Baedeker, London, 3, 93, 96, 97; and Massie, Dreadnought, xx.

  The new Locomotives: Browne, Rise, 236.

  Queen Victoria herself: Cullen, When London Walked, 137.

  “the contact of a dog’s tongue”: Ellis, Psychology of Sex, 21.


  The Duke and Duchess: Maurois, Edwardian Era, 278.

  “probably including”: Priestley, Edwardians, 66.

  Barbara Tuchman: Tuchman, Proud Tower, 68–69.

  With this new awareness: Details in this paragraph come from Tuchman, Proud Tower, 92–106; Browne, Rise, 232–35, 279; and Deghy and Waterhouse, Café Royal, 50–57. Malato’s guidebook is excerpted on p. 57, and also in David, Fitzrovians, 96–97.

  The new location: Cullen, When London Walked, 101–2.

  When the police moved: Jeffers, Bloody Business, 93.

  No one called him: Massie, Dreadnought, 15.

  Before breakfast: Magnus, King Edward, 333.

  The prince hated: Massie, Dreadnought, 15.

  By the late 1890s: Rose, Edwardian Temperament, 165.

  The number of variety theaters: Read, Urban Democracy, 42; Priestley, Edwardians, 172. Baedeker, London, on p. 64, puts the number of music halls in London alone at 500.

  She kept a cast: Massie, Dreadnought, 13.

  PART II: BETRAYAL

  THE SECRET BOX

  “Maxwellians”: For a detailed examination of Hertz’s work and the respect, if not adulation, afforded him by Oliver Lodge and his camp, see O’Hara and Pricha, Hertz. See also Hong, Wireless, 44.

  Soon afterward: The postal details in this paragraph come from Baedeker, London, 80, 122, 181.

  “It has gone twelve now”: Mullis’s account is quoted at length in Baker, Preece, 266–67.

  Preece and Marconi were kindred: Hong, Wireless, 37–38.

  Preece recognized: Aitken, Syntony, 210–14, 288.

  Later Preece would state: Aitken, Syntony, 288.

  In a letter to his father: Marconi to Giuseppe Marconi, April 1, 1896. “Letters,” 96–97.